Welcome to Windows 7 Forums. Our forum is dedicated to helping you find support and solutions for any problems regarding your Windows 7 PC be it Dell, HP, Acer, Asus or a custom build. We also provide an extensive Windows 7 tutorial section that covers a wide range of tips and tricks.

Windows 7: Make 'close window' button kill the process?

One of the forever most annoying things about Windows, is that if a program stalls and you want to kill it, clicking the 'x' button for closing the window, actually does nothing.

Is there a way to make this button forcibly kill the process, without having the wait ages for the "This program appears to have stopped working" prompt? (or just make it immediately open up that prompt, if the program doesn't kill itself within a couple of seconds?)

I'm sorry echideret, but you won't got any helpful answers with that attitude. And I'm afraid that is the only way you can kill the process. Although a quicker way of opening task manager is by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc. Ot you can right click the taskbar and go from there.

EDIT: By the way, try not to bump old threads. If you have a problem, make a new post. Of course, it's too late now but keep that in mind for future reference.

As far as I understand the window is a part of the process. If the process hangs or otherwise becomes unresponsive, then the window buttons stop working as well. Sometimes you can still move the window around and sometimes you can't. Sometimes clicking on any button will just make the window shaded (sort of) and either you wait until the problem resolves itself (if the problem is with memory or a plugin) or you kill the process. Sometimes clicking on the "close" button produces that prompt that the OP is talking about.

So, my understanding is that it is basically impossible to do what the OP wants, since for this the window and the app should be separate processes. In which case the only way to kill the process would be to use the Task Manager.

As long as you have Windows Aero, if you repeatedly click on the closed button of an application Windows will prompt you if you want to forceably close (aka. Kill the process) the application, wait for it to respond, look for a solution in Microsoft's database. I know it works on most applications since the Window frame is managed by dwm.exe. Applcations with full custom UIs may not work completely in this regard.

Make 'close window' button kill the process?

How do I kill a process that cannot be killed in the usual way?Have encountered the below issue 3 times already.
I launch a program - from Windows 7 startup panel
The program does not show up.
I try again and even a 3rd time.
Nothing happens.
Looking in the taskmanager first tab the program is not listed there
Under processes it is indeed listed,...

open explorer, starts new process, close it, process remains activeHi,
I've got a quicklaunch shortcut to:
%windir%\explorer.exe shell:::{323CA680-C24D-4099-B94D-446DD2D7249E}
That takes me straight to my explorer favourites. What I notice is that when I launch that, I get a new explorer.exe thread appear in the task manager. When I close it though, that...

General Discussion

Kill process with cmdWhat would be the command to kill a process like explorer.exe or wininit.exe through cmd?

Performance & Maintenance

Make Close Window Button LargerHey everyone!
I was playing around with some other themes but didn't really like any of them so I'm back with the default(ish) theme.
The only problem is that when the program I was using tried to reset the theme back to default, it made the button to close the window the same size as the...

Customization

Can't close window with X buttonNew here, looking forward to reading through some of the threads here and learning more about Windows 7.
I've been running RC1 since it became available, and recently I've added 2 other user accounts on my main PC. These 2 accounts seem to have the same problem: neither of them allow you to...